Games/Minetest Game

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Revision as of 15:33, 9 July 2014 by Twoelk (talk | contribs) (added 0410 news and rearranged the artical accordingly)
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Minetest (technical name: “minetest_game”) is a Minetest game which is installed by default.

Function

As default game

This game is included by default to give some initial single player content when Minetest is downloaded in the single archive file from the download section of the homepage. It includes some basic mods that add enough game content to offer a simple playable game with control keys and basic gameplay activities set to be function similar to other games of the genre to make immediate playing possible.

The Minetest-Game is not needed to play on other servers as all game content is controlled and "served" by the hosting server. Only when running an own Minetest server is some playable content needed that is normally a collection of mod scripts in a “game” folder. “Single-player” may be viewed as a special case when the local Minetest program acts as local game-server, hosting a local game and then connects to its own self as client.

As basis for new games

The game-play can be modified considerably by Lua scripts organized in mods. As a lot of mods name “default” as dependency, the Minetest-Game is thought as the basic content on which game designers may build their own games. Thus if compatibility with most mods is the aim of a new game it is advisable to start building the new game by adding content to a copy of the default Minetest game.

As collection of modding examples

Although this may seem trivial this function of the Minetest game should not be forgotten as it often offers the first example of how to code things for modders.


0.4.9-Branch

Since early 2014 the Minetest-Game was semi-officially under feature freeze. It was not dropped and was be kept available in maintenance-mode as basis for all mods that depended on "default". The consensus of the Minetest developers seemed to be that the Minetest-Game should be changed as little as possible[1] (feature-freeze) and rather no new content added. Thus offering the most compatibility to old mods and leaving the bulk of game content for game designers to develop.

Notable things not included

As the Minetest game was included in the download archive it was supposed to be lightweight and as gameplay-neutral as possible. It therefore often irritated new players that many things known from similar games were not included by default.

Although the default game offered rails, it did not include mine carts, boats or any other vehicles as such.

No mobs[2] or NPCs were included and no API for these was offered.


0.4.10-Branch

With the release of 0.4.10 the Minetest-subgame Minetest-NeXt was merged[3] with Minetest game.

Content

It containes the following mods:


Future development

To give more examples of the possibilities of the Minetest engine it had been discussed to include more example games in the download archive. The only other game that was included in the 0.4.9 versions of Minetest was Minimal, which is only recommended for testing purposes. Games suggested as example games[4] have been Dwarves, PilzTest, Nostalgia, Realtest, Eden or a game based on the Ethereal mod. More recently BFD, Minetest NeXt and Carbone have been considered among others. The idea is to showcase a variety of different gameplay, environment and atmosphere concepts.


Notes and References

  1. "Minetest Game will no longer be developed" thread on the Minetest forum.
  2. Though rats might just be able to sneak in if you are not carefull ;-).
  3. "(0.4.10) NeXt merged / Updated minetest_game" thread on the Minetest forum.
  4. as discussed on IRC at 2013-10-17